Pinger’s disruptive Textfree service is heading to Europe, and it’s doing it with the help of hottest buzzword around: gamification.
Pinger has managed to build a huge userbase in the United States by offering free text messaging without any major catches: users are given their own, real phone numbers, and they can send and receive text messages with any phone. And, most important — the app works on the iPod touch, which doesn’t otherwise have SMS functionality built-in. Pinger also launched a free voice calling service in December but lets users make free phone calls and earn minutes by completing basic offers. Pinger makes money off of these offers and by running ads in its mobile apps— to the tune of billions of impressions a month.
But the SMS situation in Europe makes international expansion a difficult affair. Cofounder Greg Woock explains that in the US, when a text message is exchanged both the sender and recipient ‘burn’ one of their texts — in other words, they’re both paying for it. → Read More
Pinger’s Textfree, the app that lets users send and receive free text messages and phone calls using real phone numbers, has a new best friend: the big green Android robot.
We’ve been tracking Textfree’s staggering growth for some time now — CEO Greg Woock says that Textfree users now exchange 1.5 billion messages and 45 million voice minutes each month, making it one of the top 10 carriers in the US. And that usage has led to some big opportunities for advertising: he says they’re closing in on 2 billion monthly ad impressions. → Read More
Pinger’s free texting and phone application Textfree is continuing to see booming growth. The app, which has been downloaded over 14 million times for iOS and Android devices, uses an ad-supported model to provide free SMS and voice calls to users and now ranks among the top mobile carriers by volume of messages exchanged. And it’s hitting some impressive milestones.
For those that haven’t used it, Textfree gives users a free, unique phone number which they can use to send and receive free text messages through the service’s mobile app. That’s nice on mobile phones (you don’t burn through your carrier SMS allotment), but it’s proven especially popular on the iPod Touch, which can’t typically send or receive text messages. Users are now exchanging over 1 billion text messages per month through the app (to give some context to that, in September Textfree had exchanged 3.5 billion messages cumulatively since its launch in March 2009). → Read More
Last fall at TechCrunch Disrupt, Pinger, the company behind hugely popular texting application Textfree, announced that it was adding voice support to its application — a big deal, given that it adds voice calling to the iPod Touch and it allows iPhone users to make calls without burning their AT&T minutes.
The feature was in beta for around two and a half months (during which it was tested by thousands of people), and it went live for everyone on December 21. Today, Pinger is announcing just how well it’s done: between December 21 and December 30, users made 2.5 million voice calls. That’s a lot of talking.
On an average day, Textfree hands out somewhere on the order of 15,000 free phone numbers to its users (when you sign up for the service you get a new, unique phone number, which your friends can use to text and call you). → Read More
The votes have been tallied. The judges have weighed in. A battlefield of twenty-seven startups was whittled down to a final, elite group of seven. And now the winner has been chosen: Qwiki has taken the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from Disrupt NYC winner Soluto. Upon receiving the cup, CEO Doug Imbruce exclaimed, “Let’s change the world!” → Read More
Earlier this month we took a look at Pinger, the company behind Textfree, a massively popular application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that gives users free, unlimited text messaging. Since launching in March 2009, users have sent over 4 billion text messages with the app, which has been downloaded 8 million times (these numbers effectively put Pinger in the top ten US carriers, volume-wise). And today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the company is announcing that it’s venturing into new territory: voice calls.
Textfree will soon include a true SIP-based VOIP client that works over both 3G and Wifi. The feature is enabled by the fact that Pinger gives all of its users free, unique, real phone numbers (it distributed 1.7 million phone numbers last quarter; AT&T gave out 1.6 million in the same time span). Calling works as you’d expect: hit the call button, and you’ll see a dialpad — you’ll be able to place calls whenever you have a data connection. This is especially huge for iPod Touch users, who already comprise most of Textfree’s userbase and can now use their devices as phones. → Read More
It’s a promise sounds too good to be true: free, unlimited texting to and from your iPhone. And even if a service did manage to offer it, it certainly couldn’t be sustainable, could it? Pinger, a startup that launched back in 2006 as a voicemail service but has since pivoted in a big way, would beg to differ: the company has managed to become immensely popular on the iPhone by offering free text messages to users through an application called Textfree. And it’s just blown past another major milestone: users have sent 3.5 billion text messages using Textfree since it launched in March 2009.
So how do the do it? The key, unsurprisingly, is ads. Textfree has gotten such massive distribution that it can now turn a profit by placing ads in the application (the company has been profitable since December). Textfree doesn’t insert ads into your conversations — rather, it shows basic display ads which get 1.4 billion ad impressions a month. → Read More
Pinger has flown relatively under the radar for an app developer that has launched 14 apps that have all reached the top 100 iPhone apps in the App store. The startup’s Textfree app has surpassed more than 1 Billion text messages sent in less than 9 months. The app allows owners to send free text messages to any US mobile phone, including replies. The app has a free version which allows users 15 messages daily at no cost, and an unlimited version which is priced at $5.99 per year. Textfree has seen 5 million downloads since its launch last year.
Pinger also says it has achieved profitability though the startup won’t reveal actual revenue numbers. Pinger generates revenue through 4 main channels, including advertising within its apps, affiliate fees to Apple, in-app ads and purchases. And Pinger has more than 15 million downloads across all of its apps. → Read More
Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program. But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily. Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back. How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?” Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there. There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks. The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert → Read More
Voice messaging service Pinger no longer requires recipients to be pinger members in order to listen to messages on their mobile phones. Instead, upon receiving messages from Pinger users, recipients will be prompted by a text message to click and call a local number to hear the message. Previously non-members were emailed Pinger messages. Sending messages out and managing contact lists will still be reserved for Pinger members, however. Pinger’s normal service is meant as an alternative to text messaging, letting users send voice messages to each other without ringing the recipients phone, waiting, or difficulty of typing while on the go. All a user has to do is call into their Pinger number, say the name of the recipient or recipients (for group messages), and leave a voice message in their Pinger mailbox. Pinger members are then notified of the message by text, prompting them to click through and listen to the message, to which they can immediately reply by another Pinger message. Pinger is rumored to be backed by a total of $11 million including financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DAG Ventures. → Read More
The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry‘s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length). 3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company – your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features. The List Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today. 3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO. Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005. Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using. Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia. We reviewed it at launch. Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005. Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo. Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically. There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post – but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today. The Features → Read More
I met with Pinger founders Greg Woock and Joe Sipher last week to see a demo of their new mobile product launching later this year. This is a serious company with a dead simple, viral product in the mobile voice messaging space. Pinger, which was called Project Edgar at the time, raised $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in November 2005, and Kleiner partner Randy Komisar joined the board of directors. The founders both came out of Handspring (Greg was VP Sales and Joe was VP Marketing) and also worked together at Virgin on a project that never launched. There’s not much we can say yet about the product, but I will say that this is one of the few mobile applications that I’ve seen that I’ll use every day. And the private beta is more buttoned up than most non-beta services we’ve tested. More on this as soon as the company gives the green light. Sign up to be notified of launch on the Pinger home page. → Read More
